One after the other - Wonderland and Active Worlds

Posted on July 15, 2008 
Filed under Harbingers, Helpful, Reviews, Trends

I spent a couple of hours poking around a few nodes in Wonderland , Immersive Education Initiative on the Media Grid, and then in Activeworlds and Activeworlds educational universe.

Wonderland is self-described as primitive in terms of development, but given that it was only launched in June it’s quite impressive and full of potential. What’s most compelling about the grid is that it’s technological infrastructure is distributed, a computational grid. The idea that each entity or organization has a node  on an open grid if fundamentally different than the computing framework of SL or AW, both of which are proprietary. It would seem that the media grid has more Metaverse potential than either SL or AW for this reason.

AW’s browser based interface is really quite impressive. I didn’t do much in there otherwise except fiddle with my avatar, which was also incredibly simple in their new 4.2 release. The user interface is designed quite differently than in SL and thus more useful for learning. For example it’s brower-based so that you get web pages and the AW in interface. AW has been around for since 1996 when it was called AlphaWorld, so they’ve been working on their product for a while and it shows.

I heard again at another conference that the the developments in technology, software and hardware (graphic cards) make it difficult to predict what’s a good investment. It seems that any investment is best made for the short term, at least to start.

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